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Seeking thoughts on a theater membership concept

My name is Jordan McLaughlin. I’ve been brainstorming on a new concept to try and help privately owned and historic cinemas to sustain and/or improve attendance and profitability. I’d love for your feedback to see if it’s something they’d be interested in me pursuing further.

The general concept is a membership for both patrons and exhibitors where discounts are provided to the patrons and specific admittance restrictions for the theaters. The membership for both being exclusive to one another. Meaning, the patron membership gets them access to a variety of historic and privately owned cinema’s country wide at a discounted admission, and the theaters are allowed to govern the admission restrictions on-the-fly*.

This is how I’ve sort of envision it working.

· Patron A joins the membership and is granted access to discounted admissions to participating theaters. Patron A marks off specific theaters within their region and elects to have notifications of available movies and times updated to their mobile phone app. or a text message alerting them when a new movie they’d like to see is available for the discounted rate. They mark off they’d like to see “Iron Man 3” with an understanding that this movie may never become available as disclosed as part of the membership agreement.

· Cinema X joins the membership and is given access to the pool of patron members just waiting to see movies at their cinema. Cinema X determines that the final week of “Iron Man 3” film rental is looking to be mostly vacant and drawing little crowd. They mark the Thursday night showings as available to the patron membership at a discounted rate to try and draw concession traffic.

· Patron A then receives the notification and make plans to attend the theater. Because Patron A feels like they’re getting a bargain they spend more concessions!

*all ticket prices/ movies/ and times and showings offered to the patron members are up to the theaters. They would have to communicate the rates to me so that I can pass it to the patrons.

The behavior of patrons selecting theaters and films they want to see keeps this from being just another spam text or email message to the patron. The concept is to deliver the genuine interests to the patrons and theaters so there’s no unwanted fluff.

There’s a bit more involved and likely a nominal monthly fee for being part of the membership. Let me know what you think?!

-Jordan

Comments (2)

MoviePass is starting to understand this data and track it in a way that makes sense – the other company you may look at is Cineplex in Canada which has a loyalty system tightly integrated with other customer transactions (including online downloads, and perhaps financial data as some loyalty cards are linked to Scotibank credit cards). I personally hate a monthly fee unless it was providing value: MoviePass sure does, whereas AMC Stubs….I don’t know why they care so much about my $12. I never get why companies nickel and dime you over $12 when there’s thousands of dollars to be made: they should provide one level for the general public and another (perhaps with a special card like Regal does) for the ballers who frequently come out. I’m all for anything that will inspire frequent movie-going, this is what exhibition needs.